A Critical Need: A Clean, Safe Environment for Our Children.
Being a good parent is hard work. From the moment a newborn is brought home, his or her new parents are hard at work learning everything they can about how to provide the care the child needs in order to thrive.
Certainly, there is much to learn. Parents of newborn children will learn more than they ever thought imaginable about the child's stages of development, nutrition, breastfeeding, burping (yes burping), baby equipment (cribs, car seats, carriers, etc.), sleep patterns, crying, teething, diapers and toilet training, language development, and motor skill and emotional development, to say nothing of illnesses and emergencies.
One oft-overlooked area of importance to the young child is simply this: cleanliness. A clean, hygienic living environment for your child can make all the difference in the world regarding just how much time your child spends healthily and heartily exploring the world around him/her versus how much time is spent in the doctor's waiting room waiting for relief from the latest infection. Thus, time spent washing hands, the floor, and the diaper changing area especially, is time very well spent.
However, no matter how careful the child's parents are, one potential source of infection will arise time after time after time. The infant, in the course of his or her usual playtime activities, will knock the pacifier out of mouth and onto the floor. Even when the floor is newly cleaned, the sound of the pacifier, a device which resides in his or her mouth, striking the floor is a sound that one never quite gets used to.
Certainly, most parents will frequently wash the pacifier off, but the frequency with which this happens compels the notion that both the child and the parents would be better off if, somehow, the frequency with which the pacifier falls all the way to the ground could be reduced. Furthermore, every parent can also tell numerous stories about pacifiers that have totally disappeared even though the home in which they are raising their child, at this time of their lives, is modest in size.
What is needed is a convenient way to keep baby's pacifier (and other baby appliances) close at hand and, if at all possible, clean as well. Furthermore, as any caregiver can attest, child care is multitasking; the preferred product solution to the above-referenced problems should also be configurable to provide support to bibs, booties, and all of the other appurtenances that are a part of a child's every day life.
It is to these needs that the instant patent application is directed.